John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II (born June 9, 1963) is an American actor and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, becoming a teen idol. Turning to film, he played the title character of Edward Scissorhands (1990), and later found box office success in films such as Sleepy Hollow (1999), Pirates of the Caribbean film series (2003–present), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Rango (2011). He has collaborated with director and friend Tim Burton in seven films, including Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Alice in Wonderland (2010).

Depp has gained acclaim for his portrayals of people such as Edward D. Wood, Jr., in Ed Wood, Joseph D. Pistone in Donnie Brasco, Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, George Jung in Blow, and the bank robber John Dillinger in Michael Mann's Public Enemies. Films featuring Depp have grossed over $3.1 billion at the United States box office and over $7.6 billion worldwide. He has been nominated for top awards many times, winning the Best Actor Awards from the Golden Globes for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and from the Screen Actors Guild for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. He also has garnered a sex symbol status in American cinema, being twice named as the Sexiest man alive by People magazine in 2003 and 2009.

Depp was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of John Christopher Depp, Sr., a civil engineer, and his wife, the former Betty Sue Wells, a waitress. He has one brother, Daniel, who is a novelist, and two sisters, Christie (now his personal manager) and Debbie. His parents divorced when he was a teenager and his mother married, as her second husband, Robert Palmer (died 2000), whom Depp called "an inspiration to me". The Depp family in the United States began with a French Huguenot immigrant, Pierre Deppe or Dieppe, who settled in Virginia around 1700, part of a refugee colony situated above the falls on the James River. The actor has also surmised that he is part Native American, saying in 2011, "I guess I have some Native American somewhere down the line. My great-grandmother was quite a bit of Native American, she grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek."

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